


1950

by aheadfulloffollies



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: Gay yearning, M/M, contains spoilers, i love these idiots, i'm so bad at tagging things pls save me, yearning and prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:48:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27824005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aheadfulloffollies/pseuds/aheadfulloffollies
Summary: Set before Henry meets Alex's dad, Alex reminisces over a certain prince and realizes that he's head-over-heels in love.
Relationships: Alex Claremont-Diaz/Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor
Comments: 8
Kudos: 47





	1950

**Author's Note:**

> i've recently become obsessed with the song 1950 by king princess, and it gave me huge firstprince vibes, so i had to. i just had to. i hope y'all enjoy !

Alex Claremont-Diaz likes to  think he’s pretty proficient in doing things. Like, he might not have been the smartest person around (that was Nora) or the best at being productive (June), but he held his own. Even when everything was falling apart around him and the world seemed to be going to shit, he works. He  _ does  _ stuff. That’s his whole thing.

But a goddamned English prince with a goddamned stupid accent and a goddamned mind of his own that made him kiss Alex under a tree in the moonlight and fuck him in a hotel room and sing karaoke doing oddly sensual air guitar riffs is ruining his whole fucking brand. This isn’t, like, a  _ new _ revelation. It had been pretty obvious ever since that first kiss that Henry turned Alex into the type of person who sat around all day daydreaming about living in a fucking cottage making bread and eating chocolate in bed.

He makes the best of it. It’s not as if he has much of a choice, considering that his options are to do nothing all day every day and be absolutely useless to his mom’s campaign, democracy, and the entire country of the United States, or work no matter what stupid images of blond hair and soft smiles and quiet laughter infiltrate his mind at the most obscene times. Besides, he’s pretty sure that being useless was his Achilles heel. Alex always has to be  _ doing  _ something, in motion, helping someone.

But now he realizes with the most abundant clarity that he, the very person who had insisted he and Henry’s relationship remain purely for convenience- that they were friends with benefits, a casual fling- has fallen in love. The first son of the United States has  _ fallen in love _ with the fucking  _ Prince of England _ . And it’s an absolute clusterfuck, but he can’t help congratulating his heart on having the audacity to do something so mind-blowingly stupid.

Unfortunately, Alex’s mind and heart seem to be working in tandem at the worst possible time, because Alex is incapable of doing  _ anything.  _ His days are filled with listless wondering, images of soft kisses and rough fucking and secret smiles across very official, very important tables with very important people sitting at them. When he sits down to look at Texas’s polling, his mind fills with the image of a reluctant selfie Henry sent him wearing one of the campaign pins he sent him all those months ago. When he tries to talk with Nora about the statistics involving the Lometa longshot turning Pennsylvania  _ and _ Texas, the only thing he’s able to say is that, dear  _ god, _ doesn’t Henry look like a goddamned prince of olde, a famous painting, an unknowable God posing as human when he’s well rested under the sun?

Alex is useless, and it’s his biggest fear, but he doesn’t even fucking  _ care _ because he’s useless in love.

Desperately, somewhere in the deepest bits of his soul, he’s aware that he needs Henry to tell him exactly why this can’t happen. Why love- even more than anything else they’ve done, all of which could possibly be labeled stupid (as Zahra has, does, and will continue to do)- is the most crazy, ridiculous,  _ idiotic _ thing to come out of this whole affair.

He needs Henry to look him in the eye and tell him, word for word, breaking it down and breaking Alex’s heart, why this is wrong. Why they  _ can’t _ . Why this is the worst idea he’s ever had and, for once in his fucking life, he has to choose to not be a dumbass.

But.

But more than that, he  _ needs _ , with his entire soul, for Henry to know that he’s the God Alex prays to. That he’s so in love he can’t think straight and that Henry  _ saved _ him, that he pulled him up when he didn’t even know he was in the abyss, and he wants to scream because there’s no way, in any language Alex knows and probably not the ones he doesn’t either, to articulate just how much he’s in stupid, messy, crazy, beautiful love.

June and Nora roll their eyes as Alex counts down the days to when he next sees Henry, his mom shakes her head and laughs, Leo is oblivious. He doesn’t care about any of it, what anyone else thinks, and that’s his first sign that he’s too far gone.

The second is when he’s on the phone with Henry- something he finds himself needing more and more of lately- and he confesses that he’d like to live a normal life. To find a house in a quiet town with nice people and lovely evening skies, where he and Alex could just  _ be _ and he could tell him how beautiful he thinks he is every day, and all Alex can think is that his heart is filled with hope and all he wants in the entire world is to give Henry a taste of that.

The third is when he wonders, for maybe the first time in his life, if he’s truly enough. It’s not as if he’s never had self esteem issues before, but they’re nothing compared to the white-hot horror that dons on him when he realizes that he’d never be what Henry deserves, and maybe he knows that too. But then it slips out on a late-night call, delirious with love, high on sleep deprivation and coffee and whispered dreams, that he hopes he’s enough, and when Henry laughs like the question is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard, it’s like Alex is flying.

The fourth, the biggest and scariest that Alex will only realize is a reason after he confesses something in a moonlit lake with fireflies dancing and stars reflecting on the water like the universe decided to paint his love, is that he never once thought Henry might leave in the night.


End file.
